News Literacy: Sponsored Content

Sponsored content is ad content that lives on a publishers website. It is usually written by the publisher's staff so that it matches the tone and voice of the rest of their content.

Notice the example to the right. This is an article on the Yahoo! News site, written to look like a Yahoo! News article. Notice the link in the text. 

Cocainenomics is another example of sponsored content. This was ad content by the Wall Street Journal that is meant to look like an article educating readers on the history of the cocaine cartel led by Pablo Escobar. In reality it is an ad for the Netflix show Narcos.